YOW Brisbane 2015

The YOW conference is very kind to local meetup organisers, I was lucky enough to be offered a ticket in return for introducing a couple of sessions.

Monday

Keynote: Adrian Cockcroft

Complexity, understanding, composition and abstraction.

Past, Present and Future of Java: Georges Saab

Some of the new fp/multi core stuff slowly coming down the pipeline. I’ve always had high expectations for Java and the surrounding environment, but every time I’ve used it I’ve been very disappointed. There’s a lot to be said for backwards compatibility, but not at the cost of destroying all the good will your development community has. The changes portrayed in this talk are quite interesting.

Play in C#: Mads Torgersen

This was a highlight of the conference for me. The Roslyn project basically inverted the Microsoft compiler from a sink to a filter which lets it be hooked up directly to the IDE. The live example was adding a linter to the IDE to complain about blocks of code not in brace extensions, complete with one click fixup. It was all very impressive.

Writing a writer: Richard P. Gabriel

Generating poems that get judged to be written by humans, all in lisp of course.

Keynote: Don Reinertsen

This was a very interesting discussion on the natural reaction in an uncertain world: making systems robust. At the very best, the most robust system (robustest? :) will be able to handle the most chaotic world and bring system performance back to normal. This talk asks us to think about the notion of a system that can actually improve in a chaotic world. The theoretic model is based on the financial idea of increasing risk implying increasing returns.

The Future of Software Engineering: Glenn Vanderburg

This was a very interesting talk on the nature of engineering, and how software engineering fits into the discipline. A highlight.

The Miracle of Generators: Bodil Stokke

This was an FP talk, I’m not a fan of bait-and-switch talks.

Tuesday:

NASA Keynote: Anita Sengupta and Kamal Oudrhiri

It’s interesting to be in a room full of engineers being exposed to different engineering requirements.

Agile is Dead: Dave Thomas

A great simplification of the underlying ideas of how to have agility.

Sometimes the Questions are Complicated, but the Answers are Simple: Indu Alagarsamy

A highlight of the conference overall, a talk about a healthy family culture butting up against backwards societal culture.

Keynote: Kathleen Fisher

Formal processes work, but we’re decades off being able to use them for day to day work.

Always Keep a Benchmark in your Back Pocket: Simon Garland

Some rules to keep in mind around designing benchmark, plus the idea of always doing benchmarking as a way of defending development work to management keen on outsourcing.

Transcript: Jonathan Edwards

One of the talks I chaired. A very interesting document and form based programming language for non-programmers to use, in the style of hypercard.

The Mother of all Programming Languages Demos: Sean McDirmid

One of the talks I chaired. More interesting ideas coming out of Microsoft. This was heavily based on physical interfaces, I struggled to think how it would apply to regular programming.